Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Android 15 hands-on: Here’s what’s coming!”.
Today, Google launched the very first developer preview for Android 15 and I have it installed here on my pixel phone, I’m going to go over all the important new features in the latest version of Android. Before I get too deep into things, I want to point out that this is a developer preview of Android 15, and that means that it’s primarily geared towards you guessed it developers. So there’s not going to be too many consumer facing changes this time around. It’S going to look a lot like Android 14 and there’s not going to be too many new tricks and features that you would expect from a new version of Android. All that stuff is going to come later.
For now, all the changes are mostly in the backend and things designed to help developers create new apps and new experiences for Android. With this first developer preview for Android 15, Google is focusing on three major categories within the operating system: performance, Hardware, access and privacy. So, let’s break down all three of these starting with performance. Everyone knows that the better processor that you have in your Android device and the better cooling system that you have for it makes a better phone for gaming and high performance tasks.
But what isn’t often discussed is how the software can interact with that hardware and that’s what Android 15 is focusing on inside Android 15 you’ll find some new updates for the Android Dynamic performance framework. This is a series of apis that allow software developers to directly access Hardware in the phone like the processor. So, for example, let’s say you’re developing a brand new Android game that uses a lot of graphic power. Well, you’re going to need to tweak the performance of the system inside the phone to make your game Run as best as possible, and these apis give developers more access to that.
On the other side, you can also tune down the performance, so, for example, if your app doesn’t require that much performance, you can tune it down a little bit to save on battery. This gives developers a a lot more control over how much battery and how much performance their app needs, which in turn makes your experience better. Android 15 doesn’t just give developers more control over the CPU and GPU, but also the camera when you’re using your native camera.
App on an Android device, you usually have a lot more features and you get a lot better quality photos and videos back as opposed to when you’re using a third party app. This is a problem that Android’s had for many many years, and Google is once again trying to figure out a way to make this better for everybody in Android, 15 developers will be able to directly access the camera hardware and do more things with it. Two examples: Google gave us would be brightening up your display preview as you’re, taking a camera to compensate for the light. That’S around you or having more control over the intensity of The Flash. So you can have better control over higher images.
Come out after you’ve, snap, the shutter, obviously these camera changes aren’t going to make too big of a difference if you have a low-end camera. But if you have high-end Hardware, this could be the difference between getting a great shot in your native camera app and getting that same quality of shot in another app. As with any Android release, Google is putting a big emphasis on privacy for the first developer. Preview of Android 15.
There are two prime examples of what Google has done here. First is partial screen sharing, so when you’re doing a screen recording using Android’s native screen recording service, you usually just get the entire display, and that includes your status bar with some, not ification icons, and when notifications come in you’ll also get interrupted on your screen. Recording by those notifications, sometimes those notifications might not be things you want. As being part of that screen record with partial screen. Recording you only record the app itself. All your notifications and the status bar at the top don’t come into play.
This is great for privacy. If you’re somebody who makes a lot of screen recordings, Google is also incorporating more activities and fitness tracking Within it’s Health Connect service. Health Connect is something that Google rolled out a number of years ago that allows you to have a secure place to store all of your health data and then allow other apps to access it. This is something that won’t have a dramatic effect on how you interact with your Fitness data, but it will make that data more secure when other apps access it.
This should give you peace of mind if you’re somebody who uses their smartphone connected to a fitness tracker or a smartwatch, because now you know that your data is not just floating out there accessible by anybody. If these new Android 15 features aren’t too exciting to you, don’t worry. This is still just the first developer preview. All the cool new features that we expect as far as design and new tricks and all that that’s going to come later with the betas, which usually come about a few months from now. We have until at least the late summer, or possibly even the early fall before Android 15 hits stable. So we have a lot of time between now and then for Google to launch new features for Android 15.
We also have a lot of time for leakers to Del into Android 15 and find the hidden features that Google isn’t telling us about, of course, to stay up to date on all that you got to stay tuned to Android authority, so be sure to check our Link in the description to find out all the features that we have for Android 15 so far, and we also have a link down there. If you want to install Android 15 on your pixel phone, of course, I don’t think you should quite yet. You probably want to wait for the betas, but if you’re feeling super adventurous, we have instructions for how to do it down there. .